19th June 1935 - Terrick to Mary

35 Nevern Place
S.W. 5

19th June 1935


My Darling Mary,

I have just rung you up for the second time.  I hope you didn't think I was vague & queer in saying what I was going to do tomorrow, but you see at least four people can hear every word I say, and I don't want everybody to know all about it here.

I have got about twenty-five film producing companys addresses from the Buff Phone Book and a good many of them are in Wardour St so I'll do a round of them tomorrow.  Even if I don't succeed in getting interviews with the staff managers I'll talk to somebody who looks as if they know & find found out from them what sort of a job I had better go for to start with, what the pay would be and so on.

I think that even if they pay is only £3 a week with prospects I'll take it, because it is only for the prospects that I am leaving the Poly (or trying to).

I must get something pretty soon.  At present I just feel that I may be spoiling some good matrimonial chances for you.  Fortunately you are only twenty-one otherwise I'd feel definitely wrong in monopolising your time without some prospect of being able to get married.

At the present minute by staying in the Poly I am losing everything I want, so that in leaving the Poly & taking the risk of a new job I really do not risk losing anything much.  I'm going to take a chance.  If I lose & get landed in something worse, well, I can't be worse off as regards marrying you.  Since I am now so far from the one thing I want, I shan't notice losing a few minor things if I end up still far off from you.

But where there's a will there's a way and before you're much older I'll damn well have something in the way of prospects.

I'll go to the Worker's Bookshop and see if I can get some sympathetically written life of Marat, showing his importance - in the light of history - in the movement for working class liberation. "The Angel of the Assassination" keeps calling him "vile, loathsome" etc that one can't get any good idea of why he was so much followed by the people in the French Revolution.

Now that I have read "The Angel" I can see greater possibilities of a really vital theme than I had ever suspected before, but it may be difficult to break it up and mould it into a play.

"Edwy" is gone to the Embassy.  I must finish counting the words of "The Slug" tonight & get "Mystery & Detection" tomorrow.  Life is great fun with so much to do, to aim for and to look forward to.

I have come to the conclusion the I would rather be a film director than a dramatist, the former can express so much more and get so much more subtle effects.  One day I'll make a film lasting two and a half hours like a play, and split it up into acts.  Then there will be time to get a real epic (overused word!) on the screen.

Do you think I write too much about things like writing and ambitions, & too little about what intimately concerns me and you?  It is because, I think, one is so wrapped up in the other.  To you I talk of my ambitions; in going for my ambitions I have an eye all the time on you.

I have been lazy, enjoying life and experiences and seeing the world, but I am waking up now - I am putting away childish things, and you shall see --.

I love you and I am determined to win you from this oyster of a world.

Your

Terrick
              XXX